


Funny, Kind Of

by Tierfal



Category: Death Note
Genre: Angst, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-30
Updated: 2010-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-06 20:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And it wasn't even that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Funny, Kind Of

**Author's Note:**

  * For [koneko_zero](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=koneko_zero).



> Giftfic, as is frequently the case... The prompt was [these bitchin' headphones](http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e257/Miri-chan/RedOboe.jpg).

There was a problem.

Okay, there were a shit-ton of problems, including but not limited to undue attention from a mass-murderer and his unwitting lackeys, undue attention from an Armenian landlady and her four burly sons, and one too many scratches on Matt's GTA: San Andreas disk.

Problem Number One, however, was Public Enemy Number One.

That was, Mello.

_Hello, Mello_ meant _Welcome to Hell_.

And Matt took it, gladly—cradled it in both hands, like water he knew would slip away.

When he'd heard the voice on the phone and started running for the car—unlisted number, unlisted number, unlisted number; his heartbeat drumming in his ears, the vibration of the engine shuddering through him wholly—some part of him had left logic with his wallet on the table, and that part of him had thought that everything would be the same.

Fire. Purgation of the purest form. Funny, kind of—how it made you freeze. How it stole your breath for fuel.

How you didn't start crying until you found him, because it wasn't real before then.

His wallet was on the table, and Mello was on the couch—Mello, in leather, in gauze, in half-dried blood and out like a light.

But he was still Mello. And Matt was still fucked.

The first sound he succeeded in making, excepting the hoarse, wheezing breaths that had sustained Matt like creaky clockwork through largely-sleepless nights, was a sob.

Funny, kind of. Matt hadn't thought that there was anything else in him that hadn't already broken.

Mello's eyes snapped open, bloodshot, blue, and he gasped, back arching, chest heaving, dragging air deeply into his lungs, again and again, as if he'd never tasted oxygen before.

Matt gripped his own right knee; at first, Mello's hand looked too fragile, and then it clawed at the couch as if it was looking for something it had lost, and he doubted he could catch it if he tried.

Maybe it was the tarry black smoke and cement dust in his throat, but Mello didn't speak a word—just turned baby-blue eyes on Matt's face and clutched the blanket until his knuckles went white.

"Hey," Matt said. "How do you feel?"

"He'll kill you," Mello told him, two centimeters short of inaudible. "He will fucking destroy you, piece by piece."

Matt flicked his lighter open and snapped it shut. Nervous habit. Panic button.

"I'm not afraid of that bastard," he replied.

"Not Kira," Mello whispered. "Me."

Matt sat back. "Huh," he said. He stood. "I'll get you some water."

And it wasn't even that.

It wasn't that Mello went through chocolate like Matt went through cigarettes; it wasn't that Mello needed twice the tap water, twice the light-bulbs, twice the real food to make up the difference; it wasn't that Mello burned a hole in Matt's meager funds that was fringed with charred leather to mirror the fragments in Matt's chest; no.

Funny, kind of, that it was none of those things, pragmatic as they were.

It was that Matt couldn't have him.

It was that the cold-hearted bitch wore a belt like a padlock, wore pants like a sheath, wore a grimace like a smile and mad, wild eyes as if lunacy was going out of style. It was that he was sharper than ever, built like a switchblade, tongue like a jackknife, armed to the ivory teeth in artifice and overcompensation, and Matt loved him too damn much to touch him.

It was that pounding his fist on the shower wall didn't make the slow-kindling need fade no matter how frigidly the water fell—and that in fact it just made the showerhead sputter, threateningly, as he looked at the new shampoo he'd bought for Mello and wondered if either of them would last long enough to wish they'd died.

Matt shouldered his way into a shirt and jammed himself into his jeans.

He could always hang himself with a controller cord.

Classy.

Mello was on eBay. Matt had always suspected that the Mafia kept Swiss bank accounts for occasions like these.

Imagining Mello in that vest pictured on the screen was not helping matters.

"Your size?" Matt asked.

"I know my measurements," Mello answered.

Matt put his hands in his pockets. "You've probably lost weight." He nodded to him—to Mello. Mello in general. Ribs, waist, wrists, hips, thighs. "You were out a while."

Mello chewed on the inside of his lip. "You have a tape measure?"

Matt flicked his lighter. "Nope."

"Not even the plastic kind?"

"Nope."

"You have a ruler?"

Matt thought it over a minute. And…

"…nope."

Mello sighed. The parasite's life was a tragic one. Mello was a choosy little beggar.

Matt looked at his tee-shirt and his other jeans, familiar fabric over Mello's not-quite-familiar bones. "Who gives a shit how you look?" he asked.

"I've got an image to uphold," Mello responded, scrolling down the page.

"What exactly," Matt inquired, "are you trying to project, and to whom? You think Near gives a shit? He wears pajamas to work every day."

Mello's whole body jerked as he looked abruptly up. He hadn't guessed that Matt knew exactly what he was planning to do, and he certainly hadn't realized that Matt had consistently contacted Near in the intervening years.

Mello's world still revolved around the center of that crucifix.

Matt shrugged to show how much he didn't care, went to the dresser, and took up his headphones and his Zune. His hair was dripping wet; maybe he could electrocute himself.

He found the loudest song he owned, a hot mess of grinding guitars and incoherent screams, and settled on the bed and into the literal and figurative cushions about his ears, abandoning himself to circumaural glory.

It was a nice place.

It was a place where, when Matt closed his eyes, Mello still thought cotton would protect him, where Mello had a shy grin and a detonating temper, where Mello only counted through half the rosary beads before he fell asleep. It was a place where Mello slept, period.

It was a place where Mello had never sold his unbelievable body and misplaced the papers for his soul. It was a place where Matt could push back the headphones, hang them around his neck, step forward, run one hand down Mello's chest, and tell him all the truths and all the fantasies.

But when he opened his eyes, he was here, and here and that place were incompatible.

He got up and went to go smoke out the kitchen window.

People had fucked with Mello when they'd fucked him. That was probably a given, in the untidy business of prostitution, which wanted labor unions and other such humanizing regulations, and Mello had probably known it from the start. Mello had probably found a way to use it to his distorted advantage.

But that didn't change the fact that Matt was not going to fuck with him, ever. Matt would rather slit his wrists and drown.

Which was a little melodramatic, but it got the point across.

The nicotine slowed the beating of his blood in his ears, which permitted him to select some slightly less violent musical accompaniment.

But he still didn't hear Mello walk in.

He probably would have jumped at the hand on his arm either way. You could only kick a puppy so many times before it ran when you raised your foot.

That was just Pavlov and shit.

It would have been okay, except that Mello didn't let him go.

Matt pushed back the headphones so that they hung around his neck, and he looked at Mello, and his hands tingled by his sides.

"You don't have to be afraid of me," Mello said.

"I'm not," Matt answered. "I'm afraid of what I'd do to you."

"Conditional tense," Mello remarked.

"Yeah," Matt replied.

"You can't hurt me," Mello told him. "You never could."

Matt curled his fingers into fists.

"I'm not the same," he cautioned.

Mello just looked at him.

And reeled him in by the headphone wire.

Funny, kind of, how simple it was.


End file.
